@brittarnhild
I could not wait till the new year to start. As soon as I had written the previous post, about Ann Morgan and her A Year of Reading the World, I knew I had to start my own project. Not a year on reading the world, that would never do, but Years on Reading the World.
To start with India was an easy choice. For many years I have been corresponding with Carolyn in Mysore, a woman the same age as my mother. For years she asked me if I would come to India for a visit, and in 2008, the year I turned 50, I decided to give myself a very special birthday present - three weeks in India. Since then I have been back once more, this time also to Mysore and Bengalore.
My two visits to India has given me a little peak into a land, a people, a culture, very different from the life I live here in Norway. Staying with friends meant that I met locals, though it must be said that it was locals from the middle class, in a big house with a wonderful garden, with servants.......all in all a good and easy life, as far as I could see from outside.
Before my first trip, while I was there, and also the years since I fell in love with India for the first time, I have read quite a few books from the area. My "Mother India", Carolyn, has over the years been a great source on literature for me, and it was during a lunch we had with some of her friends the first time I visited, that Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies was mentioned. The book was quite new then, and the women were discussing it. Some had already read it, others had not. Curiosity got me, I bought the book and on my next visit, a few years later, I bought the other two in the triology.
I did start the book, but never got into it, so for some years it has been in my shelves, waiting for the right moment. And it looks like the right moment is now!
I am about to finish the first book in this project, and I know where to travel next.